


A Blind and Covetous Passion

by Gairid



Series: After The Fall [1]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Angst, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-16
Updated: 2011-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:12:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gairid/pseuds/Gairid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Expansion of the Triptych drabbles -- Louis asks Armand about his predecessor Nicolas de L'Enfant.</p><p>Part One of series <i>After The Fall</i>, Tales of Louis and Armand's wanderings after Claudia's destruction and the burning of the Théâtre des Vampires in Temple du Boulevard in Paris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Blind and Covetous Passion

**Author's Note:**

> \--* I had quite complacently once thought that knowledge would never be withheld by Armand, I knew it. It would pass through him as through a pane of glass so that I might bask in it and absorb it and grow.  
> *This particular line is a direct quote from Anne Rice's 'Interview With The Vampire'
> 
> \--Timeframe: Late 19th century.

The Arno River flowed silently below us, dark surface flecked with fugitive light from the dwellings across from the Vasariano corridor that we traversed. The evening had been tolerable, spent gazing upon and discussing Agnolo Bronzino's works, specifically the icy distance his paintings seemed to have in spite of the pulsing voluptuousness infused in his renderings of the human form. 

Armand's voice was animated, his manner relaxed which was not unusual when the tension between us was low as it was this evening. His knowledge was finely detailed, astonishing really, except that I knew a little about him by this time. His maker had been such a Master—Armand had gone so far as to show me several paintings that he had done, this vampire whose name he would not speak. Armand himself had been apprenticed to him.

He had clearly been enjoying the discussion and as such it took him some little while to realize that I had disengaged. He lapsed into calm silence, occasionally looking toward me. He was not at all impatient with silence, perhaps reading as much into what was not spoken as to things said. His ability to read me was enervating and though he did a passable job on being unobtrusive, he knew far too much for me to think that he placed much value on my privacy. This night I'd believed his surprise, which I had glimpsed only momentarily, was authentic.

I stopped before one of the arched windows in the long wall that gazed down onto the cobbled street below; tile roofs and shops closed for the night and a perfume of flowers from a rooftop garden. I turned my head and met his patient gaze.

“Tell me about Nicolas.”

And there it was-- a flash of surprise, brief as the beat of a sparrow's wing but real enough to cause a fierce, almost painful stab of triumph within me. He is always calm, I thought. No matter what is seething away beneath the ridge of bone above his eyes, there is only tranquility to be seen on his smooth countenance. When he answered, his voice was also tranquil; there was even a note of bemused resignation that should have alerted me that I had likely underestimated him yet again.

“He never told you, did he. Perhaps because you are very like Nicolas was in some ways.” He looked at me and his large eyes projected curiosity, even sympathy. I waited in silence, focusing on the flicker of a candle, wavering and yellow in contrast to the now-prevalent gaslight, in the window above the darkened shop below.

“Nicolas was one of Lestat's unfortunate fledglings,” he said at length.

One of them? I thought. One? Armand took my elbow and gently pressed me forward away from the window and we continued on. I suppose that my face was as blankly smooth, as devoid of actual feeling as his was when he'd answered my question and the thought somehow horrified me. I wondered vaguely if he was aware of the freshet of pain released by his statement but that question fled, dashed away by another and another. I asked only one more that night.

“Where is he?” I said finally.

“Destroyed,” he said simply. “Years ago, now.”

He did not elaborate and I did not have it in me to ask anything more that night. He waited for me to speak again and I wondered what he thought I might do, what he might be eager for—anger or anguish? I didn't know what to feel and the small bubble of restrained excitement that seemed to drift from some great depth within him went a little way toward clearing the confusion I felt. I left him in the long corridor with its high arches and I did not see him for a space of nights, preferring to examine this revelation with at least an illusion of privacy. Armand was near, I knew it, could feel it because that was what he wanted, but he left me alone.

****

Some nights later I rose quite early. The clouds were still streaked with pink and lavender and the streets bustled in a celebratory way with people grateful for the warm spring air. I made my way across the ancient Ponte Vecchio and eventually found myself in the gathering dark wandering the Boboli Gardens. There were still mortals there, couples and parties of them walking the pathways. I kept away from the areas they strolled and found a stone bench just beyond one of the formal gardens, fragrant with roses and peonies. The vista took in tall Lombardy poplars silhouetted against the violet sky and beyond, Florence, dominated by the enormous duomo.

The thirst was not strong in me yet; the familiar tightening in my veins was there to be sure, but the insistent pain had not yet taken hold of me; instead I felt turmoil of a different sort, pain laced with sorrow. I was grateful that I didn't sense Armand's presence because these emotions, which were illuminated by an as-yet nascent flame of anger, nourished him as much as blood-- perhaps more so. He had explained to me that the longer a vampire lived the less insistent that need was though the desire for it never seemed to leave.

With the grateful darkness settling over me, I allowed myself to think. Nicolas. That name that had come to the forefront of Armand's mind one rain-lashed night some weeks past. Such unguarded thoughts were rare with him: the occasional slips occurring only when he was distracted. The night I'd cleanly plucked that name from his thoughts he had been somewhat more than distracted, teasing the outer reaches of pain mixed with a filthy sort of pleasure from my overwrought muscles and nerves.

Armand was a master at such work and my participation was not forced as one might at first think. It had begun gradually-- my first passive capitulation to his blind and covetous passion came from a place that had been a part of me before I'd ever known there were such creatures as vampires. Licentious sensation had been but one way I sought surcease from those things that I found unbearable and for a while it brought some small measure of success.

So too with Lestat. When things had gone so wrong between us there was still that release to be had. With him there was also a hunger with a frightful strength that I had never known, an incendiary need that would not leave me-- a need that still slumbered in spite of all that had happened. I suspect there is a great deal that Armand has not told me. I had quite complacently once thought that *knowledge would never be withheld by him, I knew it. It would pass through him as through a pane of glass so that I might bask in it and absorb it and grow.

How absurd. How self-delusional.

It occurred to me as these things passed through my mind that what had seemed to be a chink in the mind armor that Armand habitually wore was more likely to have been deliberate; it was difficult to be certain. Whether or not it was deliberate I thought that what little he'd said about this Nicolas had been true.

It had never crossed my mind that Lestat might have had other fledglings with the exception of his musician made in those final days in New Orleans. Perhaps it should have. What I had thought to be ineptitude about how one would go about teaching another about this life now looked to be something else entirely. It hurt me, yes. Lestat's holding himself from me had always been a source of pain to me, a lack of trust I could not begin to understand. Nicolas—very like me, Armand had said. What could that mean? How had he been destroyed and by whom?

I did not—could not—consider that I had been a poor substitute for this Nicolas. Lestat had withheld much, yes, but there had been love, fierce and overbearing and far too possessive, but my own belief as far that went had not wavered. As that thought crossed my mind, I became aware that Armand was near and as that awareness came upon me, he detached himself from the shadow of the wall on one side of the rose garden and came to sit beside me.

“You let this ghost from the past consume you, Louis. Why do you insist on living a haunted life? You will see so much more rise up only to be destroyed or fade away.”

I ignored his words which I recognized as a distraction and though I did not want to hear it, I said it anyway, “Tell me about him.”

“First you will hunt. Come to me at the hotel and I will tell you what you want to know.”

“That can wait. Tell me now.”

He fetched a sigh and turned the force of his mind upon me.

The touch of another's mind is difficult to describe at best because most mortals have no frame of reference for the experience. I had very little experience of it, Lestat's mind being closed to me after he brought me to him and Claudia, like me, preferring her privacy so that we used this particular power only rarely. I was not ready for the onslaught Armand loosed upon me; the flood of images made little sense to me—it was akin to seeing a large room reflected in flying shards of a shattered mirror. Tiny details glimpsed only briefly if at all, and very little of it coalescing into anything resembling an entire picture. A few details were...larger, somehow. I had an impression of dark hair falling across dark eyes as he played ...nay, tortured...a violin, his face intent, his eyes, angry and on the edge of some madness. As if from a great distance I heard a drawn gasp and realized it had been torn from my own throat.

Armand withdrew as quickly as he had advanced and I don't know how long I sat beside him with my limbs trembling and my head throbbing as though it might burst. I gathered what ragged control I could and turned my head to look at him. His luminous eyes were sympathetic, as though the battering he'd administered had come from somewhere outside himself.

“You should hunt, Louis," he said briskly, "Regain your strength and put all this from your mind. Look forward—there is always that.”

“Look forward?” I said thickly. “It was you who forced my gaze back. That was no accident, was it, my sudden ability to read you...to read that particular name. No accident. You never slip, do you? But you can make me think you have. Cunning. So cunning. How many times have you done it?”

I got to my feet, swaying drunkenly and wondering again at the innocent and beautiful shell he lived inside. Armand took my arm and his touch conveyed calm strength, even comfort.

“He was mad,” I said. I did not pull away from his support, allowing him to lead me down the wide, terrace steps of the garden.

“He should not have been made. He did not have the fortitude for immortality," he said simply. "Nicolas differed from you in that way.

I barked a laugh. “And you think I do?”

“Oh, but I know it,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone that was unusual for him. “Lestat did not choose you with any such thing in mind, of course. It is not in him to consider such a thing—at least I don't think it is. He hardly confided in me when last we spoke.” A smile crossed his mouth, fleeting and malevolent.

Against my better judgment—against everything in me that screamed he was not to be trusted, I asked the question. “Why then?”

He gave me a considering look and reached to touch my face. “A vampire is drawn by many things, is it not so? Beauty, of course. But what of emotion? Strong emotion--sorrow or hatred or desperation. Intellect? For some it is irresistible. Some call of the mind, you see.”

And I knew what he meant. Lestat had said such a thing to me once and I myself had occasionally felt drawn to mortal victims in this way.

“Why me and not another? I feel their strong emotion all the time; indeed it is difficult to block it all out sometimes.”

“You are asking a specific thing. Lestat was not one to confide his choices, least of all to me.”

“You know more than you are saying.”

“I know only part of it, Louis. You know what it is like to look into the mind of another. Muddled and disjointed—unclear.”

I didn't speak. He was a cypher to me, truths layered with obfuscation and on top of that lies mixed with audacious frankness. I could not fathom his mind even after decades spent with him. Did he know I found his admissions appalling? It was likely and there was no way to know if he was amused or offended or if it mattered to him in the slightest.

“I have no way of knowing his reasons for choosing you,” he went on. “Nicolas, however...he knew Nicolas when he was mortal. Lovers, you know. He does not like to let go of those people he purports to love.”

His words cut, but not in the way he intended them to. The more I learned, the more I realized that I had not considered how Lestat had become the angry, defensive and wounded creature he was during our time together. Longing came over me, so fierce it felt like fever, like sickness and I wondered if he had been happy with Nicolas, had they given one another joy? I hoped so.

I needed to hunt; the thirst twisted and burned in me, branched lightning in my veins. “I'm going to hunt,” I muttered. I needed to be away from Armand as much as I needed to feed. He only nodded and did not attempt to follow me when I departed the gardens with sudden vampire swiftness.

*****

 

I asked no more questions about Nicolas and Armand did not bring it up again. We did not linger in Florence after that night—I wanted to see Genoa for reasons of my own that had nothing at all to do with this life I have now, I found what I was looking for and tucked it in my memory to be examined at another time.

My restlessness grew and nothing would put it in abeyance. Armand's merciless yet somehow tender ministrations no longer distracted me and I did not wish any other intimacy with him save the occasional comfort of touch and the stimulation that was afforded by his considerable intellect. We traveled by train across Europe, skirting Paris to arrive at last in Le Havre. I had not said anything but he knew well enough I wanted to leave the Old World behind and go back to America. I dared not think further than that.

“You can stay or you can come along--the ship sails two days from now.”

“I am curious about America. I will come with you. I feel the need to leave those that have been watching us behind. They may follow at some point, but not yet, I think.”

We landed in New York--I was not ready to go back to New Orleans and Armand was immediately infatuated with the huge, dirty bustling city. It was an interim of sorts, I knew it and so did he.

FIN 


End file.
